Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with bread?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with bread most disproportionately are provolone cheese (×5.3 chance, n=74), swiss cheese (×4.2 chance, n=184), lovage (×3.2 chance, n=34), veal (×3.0 chance, n=50), mozzarella cheese (×3.0 chance, n=326), sage (×2.8 chance, n=204), lettuce (×2.8 chance, n=264) and rye flour (×2.8 chance, n=27). The score behind the ranking is positive pointwise mutual information — how many times more often a pair shares a recipe than random combination would predict — and n is the number of recipes containing both ingredients. Nothing is published below a floor of 20 recipes per pair and 100 per ingredient. Co-occurrence records what recipe authors actually do — it conflates deliciousness with popularity and tradition — so read it as ethnography, not judgment.
The measured partners — PPMI · ×chance · n
- provolone cheese — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=74 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
- swiss cheese — PPMI 1.44 · ×4.2 chance · n=184 (swiss cheese itself appears in 587 recipes)
- lovage — PPMI 1.17 · ×3.2 chance · n=34 (lovage itself appears in 142 recipes)
- veal — PPMI 1.11 · ×3.0 chance · n=50 (veal itself appears in 222 recipes)
- mozzarella cheese — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=326 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)
- sage — PPMI 1.03 · ×2.8 chance · n=204 (sage itself appears in 981 recipes)
- lettuce — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=264 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
- rye flour — PPMI 1.02 · ×2.8 chance · n=27 (rye flour itself appears in 131 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use bread with one of its measured partners:
- Fattoush — with lettuce
- Scotch Egg — with sage
- Prawn Cocktail — with lettuce
- Spotted Dick — with lettuce
- Afternoon Tea — with sage
- Cuban Sandwich (Cubano) — with swiss cheese
How this was measured
bread appears in 4,741 of the 63,696 recipes counted (5,296 parsed + 1,081 hand-curated + 57,319 from the dataset published with Ahn et al., 2011). PPMI = max(0, ln(count(A,B)·N / (count(A)·count(B)))), all counts over the same N; lift = e^PMI, which reads directly as "×chance." Staples (salt, sugar, flour, water) are excluded because sources under-record them, and pairs where one name contains the other are excluded as near-duplicates.
Read the numbers with their limits: the corpus is Western-skewed (90% of it is the largely North American and European recipe dataset published with Ahn et al.'s 2011 paper), so the absence of a pairing here proves nothing except who wrote the recipes down. PPMI favors the rare end even above the floor — a niche pair at n=22 can outrank a workhorse pair seen thousands of times, because common ingredients' huge counts divide the score down — so read PPMI and n together.
The full reference — 150 ingredients, top 8 partners each — lives at What actually goes with X.
Curious how these flavors fit your palate — take the short taste test →
Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.